Belgian Colony Blues
My grandparents and five of the six children. My dad is the baby. There's a website called findagrave.com and a distant cousin, who is a descendant of his brother Goemare posted it recently. I tracked her down to get some background, and she sent me a few other pictures she had of his family when they were still in Belgium. It felt like a circle being completed!
by Steven Christiaens
In 1913, my grandparents, Remi Christiaens and Helena Minjneau were among a contingent of seventy-nine Belgian farmers and their families, who were recruited to emigrate from their home country to northwest Montana to farm unplowed dry prairie land that was being developed by the fledgling Pondera County Canal and Irrigation District, in conjunction with the Great Northern Railroad. Remi, along with his brothers Roman, and Goemare, and their wives were among the first wave of those who left Belgium and the Netherlands over the next several years to seek their earthly paradise on the bluff and coulee studded plains of still mostly unsettled northern Montana. The amount of land available must have seemed astonishing to people who had farmed on postage-stamp-sized plots of land. The tracts set aside for the immigrants were in the early stages of the irrigation canal system, but they were still very dependent on seasonal moisture for crop production until a series of dams that would supply a steady supply of irrigation were finished. An article from the Conrad Independent Observer, dated March 6, 1913, states “These people are an unusually good-looking lot of people, much higher in intelligence and social standing than the average peasant immigrant from Europe. They have been accustomed to farming all their lives as were their ancestors before them.” (I cannot disagree, particularly on the “good-looking…higher intelligence” scale.) On average, families were allowed to buy between 80 and 160 acres at a price of around forty dollars per acre. In the first years, the Colony covered a little over 900 acres.
They arrived in the early months of 1913. My grandmother, Helena, was considerably younger than Remi. He was 46, she was 20. She may have been an employee of his family in Belgium, and possibly not yet married to my grandfather at that point. She was stingy with details of her early life, especially with her grandchildren, but she shared a substantial amount of information with my mother, her daughter-in-law, over the years.
According to an account written by my mother, “the ‘Big Sky Country’ looked like a big, desolate place to this young, homesick woman who had come to this country with not one of her own family, only members of husband’s family, and the other settlers….From the early homestead days, they did not even have a place of their own but lived with several other families until the settlers were able to buy and build their own places. Eventually, this area became a prosperous valley with rich irrigated farmland.” Their first child was born in 1914. He died of an intestinal disorder at seven months when she was already pregnant with her second child. At this point she told my mother she “would have walked home if there had been a bridge to Europe. For five years she had no desire to even learn the language of this country.”
They proceeded to have six more children between 1915 and 1923. My father, born in 1921, was four years old when he found his father hanging in the barn. He had taken his own life, possibly overwhelmed by crop losses, leaving my grandmother to raise six small children on her own, in a land where she felt she would never belong.
Helena’s brother, Bowdwyn, who had spent a few years in Montana before returning to Belgium, came back from Europe to help her run the farm. But by 1932, with the depression taking hold, and Mary, her oldest daughter, suffering from polio, she sold the farm and moved to the county seat of Conrad, 15 miles to the south. She worked as a chambermaid at the Conrad Hotel until she retired at 65. My mother and father met in 1946 in Conrad, where he worked at the state employment office after spending four years in the Navy during World War II.
As reticent as Helena was with her grandchildren, I’m glad I have the recollections of my mother to not only remind me where I came from but also to help me understand how difficult it was to simply survive, let alone thrive as an immigrant in early 20th century America. My Dad and his siblings toted a lot of baggage throughout their lives, relative to how they saw themselves or imagined others seeing them, as the scruffy, Catholic, foreigner kids whose father killed himself, and whose mother talked funny. My grandmother was a sweet woman, but she carried the scars too. I can't imagine what their childhoods were like, but there was a price to it that even I had to partially pay. It's only been in the last 25 years, or so, that I've been able to put it into perspective and accept it was part of what made me who I am, for better and worse.
Whenever I have visited the old cemetery next to the Colony church, where my grandfather and his first-born child are buried, I hear the immigrant song of ancestors singing on the prairie wind. It’s a blues song. The blues speak to me.
I want to hear from you. I want you to submit posts via email with personal stories about your family’s immigration story. How did you become an American? How do you feel about your roots? How does your family paw through its myths? My hope for this blog series is that many verses, many voices and many angles are explored here. Let’s talk about food, music, culture, invasive species and even family trees if you can make that interesting in 500 -1000 words.
